Tell us about your new novel
White River Crossing is set in Canada in the mid-18th century. It’s about a small group of British fur traders who travel to the far north to search for gold. Complications ensue.
It’s a return to the inhospitable Arctic wastes where your previous novel, The North Water, was set. What’s the appeal?
In both novels the Arctic landscape functions much like the forest in a classic folk tale – it’s a place beyond the ordinary where unexpected and sometimes frightening events can occur.
The North Water was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won the Encore and Historical Writers Association Gold Crown awards and was one of the New York Times’s top 10 books of 2016. Tell us about it
It’s about a psychopathic murderer on a 19th-century Greenland whaling ship. Style-wise I was very influenced by the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy.
Did you enjoy the TV adaptation?
I did. A great cast and Andrew Hague the writer-director is always brilliant.
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What is the purpose or value of historical fiction in the contemporary moment, especially when there are so many injustices today?
Historical fiction is able to encourage the longer view – to remind us that the problems we face nowadays, though they seem new, may be rooted in tendencies that persist over hundreds or even thousands of years.
In your foreword, you emphasise commonality over cultural or historical difference, and fictional vividness over a more literal-minded or antiquarian kind of realism. Tell us more
As a historical novelist I’m often required to think my way into the minds of characters whose lives were radically different from my own. I can only do that if I also believe that, despite those important differences, we also have something meaningful in common. Finding a way to honour both difference and universality is tricky but essential.
Historical fiction must speak to and about its own historical moment as well as to and about the period in which it is set. Could you enlarge?
If you’re writing with the aim of publication, whether you like it or not, you’re writing a contemporary novel aimed at a contemporary readership so it has to work in those terms while staying true (or as true as possible) to the period in which its set. Again it’s a matter of balance. On one side lies the risk of anachronism, on the other the risk of irrelevance or obscurity.
What inspired The Abstainer (2020), about the Manchester Martyrs? Are you of Irish stock?
I’ve lived in Manchester for 30 years, so I’m interested in the history of the city. My great-grandfather was born in Fermanagh but I never grew up thinking of myself as Irish in any way.
Incredible Bodies (2007) is a campus comedy. A very different vibe?
Yes, very different. I’m still fond of it, but probably my one and only foray into comic fiction.
In 2007 you also cofounded the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing. What is its ethos?
Our unofficial motto is good writing and good reading go together.
‘A successful book should be plausible and surprising.’ Discuss
That combination is the sweet spot. You don’t want the reader to see things coming, but once the surprising events have occurred, you want them to think, Well yes, of course, that makes perfect sense.
Which projects are you working on?
A new novel set in countercultural London in the early 1970s. Much closer to home in terms of location and era, and I’m finding the change quite refreshing.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I did an F Scott Fitzgerald tour of St Paul, Minnesota, once. We visited all the different houses he lived in as a child and young man.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
I like Flannery O’Connor’s line, “You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.” It’s always struck me as painfully true.
Who do you admire the most?
My daughters.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I’d pass a law to hobble the US tech bros, strictly regulate AI and stop Putin and his cronies interfering in our elections
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
László Kraznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance is great; I really enjoyed Richard Linklater’s recent film Nouvelle Vague; sorry, I don’t listen to podcasts.
Which public event affected you most?
Perhaps a strange answer because I was born in the 1960s, but I would say the second World War. I grew up among people who had lived through it (my father especially) and I think it had a very big, if usually unspoken, effect on them and thus on me.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
I lived in Egypt for three years in the late 1980s. The temple at Karnak is hard to beat.
Your most treasured possession?
Family photographs.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
I’ve never been into the book as an aesthetic object, so most of my shelves are filled with ordinary-looking paperback novels, but I do have a few nice art books.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
JM Coetzee and Fyodor Dostoevsky – it would be a rather serious sort of evening.
The best and worst things about where you live?
I live in northern England where the people are often great and the trains are usually terrible.
What is your favourite quotation?
“Our faith comes in moments, our vice is habitual.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Levin from Anna Karenina.
A book to make me laugh?
Lorrie Moore, The Collected Stories.
A book that might move me to tears?
Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, a study in terrible loneliness.
White River Crossing is published by Scribner UK
